All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is a 2022 documentary film which explores the career of Nan Goldin and the fall of the Sackler family.
The film was directed by Laura Poitras.
Poitras said, “Nan’s art and vision has inspired my work for years, and has influenced generations of filmmakers.”[4] The film premiered on September 3, 2022, at the 79th Venice International Film Festival,[1] where it was awarded the Golden Lion making it the second documentary (following Sacro GRA in 2013) to win the top prize at Venice. It also screened at the 2022 New York Film Festival,[3] where it was the festival’s centerpiece film and for which Goldin designed two official posters.
The film’s distributor, Neon, said that the theatrical release would coincide with a retrospective of Goldin’s work at the Moderna Museet, set to open October 29, 2022.
The film examines the life and career of photographer and activist Nan Goldin and her efforts to hold Purdue Pharma, owned by the Sackler family, accountable for the opioid epidemic. Goldin, a well known photographer whose work often documented the LGBT subcultures and the HIV/AIDS crisis, founded the advocacy group P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) in 2017 after her own addiction to Oxycontin, where she had a near fatal overdose. P.A.I.N. specifically targets museums and other arts institutions to hold the art community accountable for its collaboration with the Sackler family and its well publicized financial support of the arts. Since P.A.I.N.’s activities most of the targeted museum’s have severed all ties with the Sackler family and in 2021 Purdue Pharma filed for bankruptcy.
The film is structured in seven chapters, each of which begin with a “slide show” photographic sequence or archival footage of a period of Goldin’s life and then transitions to footage of her more recent protests with P.A.I.N. The slideshow of archival photographs is intentionally reminiscent of Goldin’s own work creating slideshows or series of photographs, such as The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. Footage of P.A.I.N. demonstrations include their first 2018 protest at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Temple of Dendur wing, as well as similar demonstrations at the Louvre and the Guggenheim Museum. Goldin is the primary narrator of the film, with additional interviews from associates such as journalist Patrick Radden Keefe and P.A.I.N. member Megan Kapler.
Goldin and two other activists had been filming their activities with P.A.I.N. for two years, intending to make a documentary about the activist group. Goldin then approached the film’s production company about turning the footage into a film, and Laura Poitras was suggested to Goldin to direct the film, based on Poitras’s work on Astro Noise for the Whitney Museum.
Goldin was initially skeptical because of Poitras’ previous political films, saying “I thought I was not going to be interesting to her because I don’t have any state secrets.”
Goldin has stated that most of the film’s footage and photographs come directly from her. Poitras expanded on Goldin’s vision for the project, and chose to make a more well-rounded film about Goldin’s life and career. These biographical elements include the suicide of Goldin’s sister, Goldin’s drug use and her sex work activities, which she had never previously publicized, as well as her art career and achievements. Goldin initially felt uncomfortable with allowing Poitras to control the film and the depiction of her life, but was happy with the finished film. Goldin said that Poitras was “telling my story in my voice, but it’s not exactly my version as I would tell it. But she’s been amazing into letting me have a lot of input into what’s used and not used.”
The film premiered on September 3, 2022, at the 79th Venice International Film Festival, where it was awarded the Golden Lion.[8] It screened at the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival on September 9.
In August 2022, before its Venice premiere, Neon acquired the US distribution rights for the movie while the UK and Ireland rights were taken by Altitude Film Distribution.
In September 2022, HBO Documentary Films acquired television and streaming rights to the film.
The is being equally Poitras’ and Goldin’s work, stating that “there’s effectively no conceptual distance between the auteur documentarian and her artist subject…the result of their sympathetic engagement is a collaboration of rare beauty and power.”
